If we’re talking about the story of someone who is overwhelmed by grief, who can’t accept life’s fate, who wants so desperately to defy the limitations of our bodies that the only escape is to create a human composite made of other people’s body parts, then yes, I could have written Frankenstein.

Like the eponymous Victor Frankenstein, I’m doing everything I can to bring an unnaturally conceived person into this world: a brand new life spliced together from other people’s body parts by combining painstakingly selected pieces in order to create my very own monster.

Two centuries ago, this was a horror story. Some argue it was the original tale of science fiction. Today it’s science fact.

There are those who don’t like science facts, however, and many of them strongly oppose egg donor in vitro. They see the procedure as a severe encroachment on the laws of nature and an ungodly experimentation on human life.

They’re not entirely wrong.

I’m aware that donor egg IVF is some freaky shit. I recently got pretty skeeved out myself after reading an article about how donor egg babies are more strongly linked to pre-eclampsia – a condition that was essentially described as the uterus rejecting a foreign body that it doesn’t recognize as its own.

I read “foreign body” as “Frankensteinian monster.”

All of which brings to mind the last time I read Frankenstein during a college course on The Gothic Imagination where the professor drove home an essential question:

In the book, the monster is actually a loving, emotional, and vulnerable being, whereas Victor himself is an arrogant man who ignores the grotesqueness of his scientific interventions because he’s too much of a self-absorbed coward to accept the limitations of the human body’s vulnerabilities. If this is the case, then who is the real monster? The creature or Victor?

Or, since we’re plagiarizing: my baby or me?

But before we demonize me or Vic too quickly, it bears keeping in mind that most medical procedures were once thought creepy and weird. The first organ transplants were over 100 years ago, and I don’t imagine those went over too well. Isn’t it possible that donor egg in vitro won’t always be met with the same cocked heads and scrunched faces that I get today?

Either way, I’m doing it. My donor’s egg retrieval is in 3½ weeks, and my embryo transfer is in four. In 5½ weeks, I’ll have my first pregnancy test, and at that point we’ll know if there’s a little monster in the works.

First of all, I love love love what you write — you know you have a gift yes?
I have to say it always makes me feel badly when I read that others feel like egg donation is “freaky” – and I recognize its something you have to work through but egg donation as a whole shouldn’t be “freaky” at all. Really, it’s just a different way to create or build your family.

In regards to pre-eclampsia or HELLP syndrome it’s not the uterus rejecting a foreign body it’s to do with our immune system. Those moms who are pregnant with their own egg can develop this as well especially if its their first pregnancy. That’s why when we go through our cycle medications like dexamethasone or medrol are prescribed because those are steroids that are for lack of a better word “anti-rejection” medications that help with implantation much like those who undergo kidney, liver, heart or lung transplants – so the body doesn’t “reject” the organ.

The other part to this is that many many women who use an egg donor don’t go through any of that, they sail right through pregnancy with no issues whatsoever.

I feel strongly that neither you or your baby to be are monsters, are weird, or a big scientific experiment.

You will get to a place someday where all of this isn’t going to be freaky, or weird, it’s just going to be again a different yet beautiful way for you to become a mother and have a child.
My son via egg donation is going to be 12 and there isn’t a day that doesn’t go by that I am just so overwhelmingly grateful for the technology and for him.

I know you are grateful, and I know this is overwhelming, and weird, and you know what to you it might be freaky, but trust me after your child is born it won’t be, I promise!

Thank you for stopping by my blog :) I too may have to consider donor eggs at some point. You made me LOL :) It’s a good comparison though! I really hope you are successful – wishing you lots of luck and all the best!